That’s the part I still can’t fully explain to people who weren’t in the room. He cried. Actually cried, shoulders shaking, the whole thing — and I held him, rubbed his back, told him it was okay, found myself in the strange position of soothing the person who had, twenty minutes earlier, been the reason I was upset in the first place. It took me embarrassingly long afterward to notice what had actually happened in that conversation. I went back…